Working Indiana - Working for Democracy and Justice

Along with other psychological baggage, each of us bears the burden of a personal view of “human nature” and Karl Marx, it seems, was no different.  Marx didn’t use the German word for it; he chose the jaw-breaking Gattungswesen, or “species-being.”  It took a century, a messy business with the Czar and his family, two world wars, and a long “cold” one before Oxford’s Gerald Cohen arrived at the common sense observation that Mr. Marx, whose adherents were now driven by history to exile in Cuba, held a view of life that shut human beings out from their essential humanity.  In Reconsidering Historical Materialism Cohen observes “Marxist philosophical anthropology is one sided.  Its conception of human nature and the human good overlooks the need for self identity, than which nothing is more essentially human.”  Sir Frank Kermode, perhaps, said this best in his Sense of an Ending.  People are born into “the middle of things” and grope for meaning by making “fictive concords with origins and ends.”  Our personal stories are by nature just that: personal.  And they are urgent.  They demand our full, if sometimes unconscious or lazy attention.  Who, for example, would entirely surrender the project of understanding the meaning of his/her life?  In one sense, hemmed in by our own subjectivity, our own world view, religion exalts itself as humanity’s collective attempt to see ourselves “objectively” in a bigger picture, a bigger story, than our own and religion and Marxism were notoriously antipathetic.

The twist for those who accept Cohen’s criticism (and many scholars don’t, a quibble that need not concern us here) is that the same mistake, the same misunderstanding of human nature, is perpetuated in modern business school human relations classes.  One H.R. text lays out the standard history of management science in a Chapter titled “Labor Unions, Good or Bad?”  John W. Budd [Labor Relations: Striking a Balance, 2d ed. McGraw Hill] describes the four schools of management theory: (1) the neoclassical, (2) human resources management, (3) industrial relations, and (4) critical—or Marxist—industrial relations.  Budd observes that, depending on the school of thought, labor unions are useful, unnecessary or bad.  Each of the four schools (and the union movement itself) are remarkably similar leaving no real “third way.”  Greatly simplified, Budd describes the neoclassical school: “focused on the economic activity of self-interested agents, such as firms and workers in competitive markets.”  The human resources management school: “focus[ed]…inside the firm…(seeking solutions through) better management.”  Industrial relations focused on “an inequality of bargaining power between corporations and individual workers” and, finally, the critical industrial relations school, believed that “employers…structur[ed] the organization of work..human resource management…and labor law…to serve the class interests of capital at the expense of labor.”  Perhaps Management “science” is crippled, out of the gate, because of its affection for the locution “human resources,” a formulation that suggests managing people is akin to the extractive industries, like mining coal, or drilling for oil or exploiting any other “resource.”

“Gattungswesen” (at least as translated and interpreted by Professor Cohen) permeates each of these “systems” since each views workers and the enterprise and the external market as subjects and objects.  Any one of these systems may have fairly described a labor market characterized by sound, long tenure employment but should we accept any one of them as a meaningful paradigm when the modern, publicly held, joint stock corporation has gone global and when one of the effects of that is a radical transformation of our labor markets?

Tenure, the strength of attachment between worker and work, largely determines the validity of any system of “management.”  When tenure promises to be long, like a good marriage, it is suitable to describe the work relationship in any one of the four schools’ language.  In a cradle-to-grave [CTG] relationship we largely abdicate responsibility for our personal narratives or they become so tightly interwoven that the distinction between public and personal stories is blurred beyond our own recognition.  The wife can “wear the pants,” the husband can have his “nights out with the boys,” misbehaving occasionally, they can be “soulmates,” or co-dependent, with varying degrees of misery inflicted on the players.  When the marriage is over (retirement) the survivor can look back with satisfaction, admitting that, “she was a tough old gal, but she had her good points.”

But, tenure is down, and headed downward.  Writing for the Federal Reserve of St. Louis, researchers Kristie M. Engemann and Michael T. Owang  conclude

With today’s labor market, people believe that they will switch jobs more often than their counterparts years ago did, as demonstrated by falling average and expected remaining tenure. Continuing technological advances and the concomitant demand for new skills will maintain these trends. [National Economic Trends, “Your Current Job Probably Won’t be Your Last” February, 2004]

Three years later, the San Francisco Fed published data confirming declining tenure and warning that reduced job stability was only one part of the story.  “Involuntary job losers” were unemployed longer and re-employed at lower rates of pay. [FRBSF, Economic Letter, November 2007-13, June 1, 2007]  A follow-up by Egemann and Owang (joined by Leora Friedberg) in The Regional Economist, January, 2005 [retrievable here] suggests that workers may be changing jobs more often simply because it makes no sense to stay in a relationship with poor prospects of advancement.  Like spouses, workers are waking up to the fact that it is unwise to remain in abusive relationships.  Yet Management science persists in describing employment with language rooted in the past.

But for the mark globalization and other factors both known and unknown are imprinting on labor markets, the antique views of HR management would have more the aspect of comedy than tragedy.  But global forces are likely to force the theory of human relations to give up its “subject-object” stranglehold on management theory, though.

Despite Constitutional protections, American workers are entering a dark age of unfreedom just when Amartya Sen suggests that the best measure of “development” is freedom itself.  American households now have the highest debt to earnings ratio since the end of World War II.  These same households have no personal savings and have pushed consumer credit card debt to historic highs all at a time when the credit card industry continues to charge legally usurious interest rates.  The median 401(k) account is inadequate to assure all but the most penurious retirement and students entering this world do so with mounting student debts largely undischargeable in bankruptcy.  Three quarters of the jobs in the labor market are “at will” with the work relationship forcing pension and health care dependencies on the worker in addition to the historic weight of household debt he or she drags to the workplace every day.  Add to this toxic cocktail shrinking job tenure and it is truly remarkable that American management theory continues to embrace subject-object theory, blind to the fact that managers and the managed share personal narratives that must include the worst sort of “wage slavery” experienced by modern man.  

European policy makers have awakened to the fact that post industrial economies foster “transitional labor markets.”  If workers are forced (or tempted) to enter and leave work relationships often, it makes no sense to dismiss them (as U.S. management science does) as promiscuous.  Instead, policy must adjust itself to reality.  Thus, the Dutch have focused social policy on “work-life,” and have attempted to view periods of unemployment as “transitions” that can be enriched by employing work-life accounts and flexible work days, accommodations that remove the risk from short tenure relations.  A summary of the Dutch program can be found here.  Readers will note this link is to our Canadian neighbors who have seemingly awakened to the notion that unemployment in the new economy is not a badge of shame but a fact of life.

If policy makers refocus on restoring freedom to the least free labor market in the world they would reduce social costs and foster improvements in the quality of life for workers at all levels.  Within the enterprise, the “Human Resources” specialist should insist upon a role that conforms to the realities of the new labor market.  If part of the reason workers disengage is, as Engmann, et. al., suggest, decreasing loyalty, H.R. bears the responsibility of communicating to management the need for incentives: higher pay, better benefits, and candor when management considers life disrupting changes such as outsourcing.  If management science does not adjust they, like the industrial unions they need to justify their existence, will fade from memory.  The focus, the paradigm, is not on subject/object, it is on fostering relationships that enhance agency and freedom.